What She Learned
BEFORE THE FIRST LaRose died, she had taught her daughter how to find guardian spirits in each place they walked, how to heal people with songs, with plants, what lichens to eat in an extremity of hunger, how to set snares, jig fish, tie nets, net fish, create fire out of sticks and curls of birchbark. How to sew, how to boil food with hot stones, how to weave reed mats and make birchbark pots. She taught her how to poison fish with plants, how to make arrows, a bow, shoot a rifle, how to use the wind when hunting, make a digging stick, dig certain roots, carve a flute, play it, bead a bandolier bag. She taught her how to tell from the calls of birds what animal had entered the woods, how to tell from the calls of birds which direction and what type of weather was approaching, how to tell from the calls of birds if you were going to die or if an enemy was on your trail. She learned how to keep a newborn from crying, how to amuse an older child, what to feed a child of each age, how to catch an eagle to take a feather, knock a partridge from a tree. How to carve a pipe bowl, burn the center of a sumac branch for the stem, how to make tobacco, make pemmican, how to harvest wild rice, dance, winnow, parch, and store it, and make tobacco for your pipe. How to carve tree taps, tap maples, collect sap, how to make syrup, sugar, how to soak a hide, scrape down a hide, how to grease it and cure it with the animal’s brains, how to make it soft and silky, how to smoke it, what to use it for. She taught her to make mittens, leggings, makazinan, a dress, a drum, a coat, a carry sack from the stomach of an elk, a caribou, a woods buffalo. She taught her how to leave behind her body when half awake or in sleep and fly around to investigate what was happening on the earth. She taught her how to dream, how to return from a dream, change the dream, or stay in the dream in order to save her life.
CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was overseen by a tall hatchet-beaked former captain of the Tenth Cavalry. Having succeeded in educating prisoners at Marion, Illinois, and having worked with young Sioux men and women at Hampton Institute, having in effect foiled those whose ideas were identical to Frank Baum’s, Richard Pratt promoted his students to sympathetic reformers, writing that the hope and salvation of the race was immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.
The second LaRose was saturated. She was smart. After the agony of getting used to her corsets she pulled them tight and wore gloves—because her mother had on special occasions worn gloves. She learned to clean white people’s houses during Carlisle’s outing program, gouging congealed dust from corners with a knife. Polishing the gray veins of marble floors. She made the woodwork glow. Sparkled up the copper boilers. Also, she wrote in lovely script and factored into the thousands. She knew the rivers of the world and the wars the Greeks fought, the Romans fought, the Americans fought, beating the British and then the savages. A list of races she had to memorize placed white the highest, then yellow, black, and finally savage. According to the curriculum, her people were on the bottom.